Thank you, this is an excellent website with valuable resources. It also holds complete flight tables for 1963. The 1956 document says 'all flight times in Peking time'. The 1963 tables say 'flight times in local time'. By comparing routes in both directions one can deduce that no timezones are crossed within China. The duration of flights between pairs of cities inside China is the same in both directions. This seems to establish that in 1956 and in 1963 there was a unified timezone in China, i.e. Beijing time. I hope that we can collect more supportive evidence, and details about the introduction date of Beijing time in the the various parts of the country soon after the foundation of the People's Republic. It is already evident that the TZ database will need an update. I hope TZ will keep the various zones, as they describe important differences before 1949, when time zones existed. It would be sad to loose this information only because after 1970 the country appears under a single zone. On 12.03.14 18:39, Sanjeev Gupta wrote:
I refer to: http://www.timetableimages.com/ttimages/complete/caac56/ <http://bit.ly/1nMKS46> , which has clean scans of the Civil Aviation Administration of China's 1956 timetable. As far as I can make out from calculating flight times, all places in China that CAAC flew to had the same timezone.